"RPC" originally referred to a programming paradigm where remote calls looked just like any other method calls, and it might not even be any of the programmer's business whether they're implemented in-process or on another machine. This obviously required wire protocols, client and server libraries, etc. to implement.

There's been a renaissance in the tools, but now we mainly use them like "REST" endpoints with the type signatures of functions. Programming language features like Future and Optional make it easier to clearly delineate properties like "this might take a while" or "this might fail" whereas earlier in RPC, these properties were kind of hidden.

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kiitos 4 days ago | parent [-]

mm, i think you're describing corba, not rpc in general

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closeparen 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

CORBA is trippier than that. A client’s request could include elements not normally serializable, like callbacks. A server could provide an object in response to your query and then continue mutating it, with the mutations reflected (effectively) in your address space, without your knowledge or participation.

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kiitos 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I am not really sure what you're talking about

RPC is "remote procedure call", emphasis on "remote", meaning you always necessarily gonna be serializing/deserializing the information over some kind of wire, between discrete/different nodes, with discrete/distinct address spaces

a client request by definition can't include anything that can't be serialized, serialization is the ground truth requirement for any kind of RPC...

a server doesn't provide "an object" in response to a query, it provides "a response payload", which is at most a snapshot of some state it had at the time of the request, it's not as if there is any expectation that this serialized state is gonna be consistent between nodes

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	▲	closeparen 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Nothing stops me from implementing a Thrift or gRPC handler that uses a field from the request to look up an object in a hashmap and then call one of its methods with data from the request. But a distributed object system will do this implicitly on my behalf, so that the programmer’s perspective is like passing objects (by reference) over the network.

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kentonv 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

That's exactly what Cap'n Web does...

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4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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